Handwriting: What Is Lost As Society Abandons Writing By Hand For Texting?

In today’s society, handwriting is considered an obsolete skill simply because it is more efficient to text or type. As a matter of fact, the majority of our communication these days is done electrically with that smart piece of technology buzzing on your hip every once a while. Despite handwriting being an obsolete skill, is it more important than what we are making it? Apparently through psychological and neurological studies, the answer is yes.

According to The New York Times, many educators don’t think there is much to handwriting. The common core standards, which have been adopted by most states as reading, writing, and arithmetic, require that legible handwriting be taught. However, there is a catch. Legible handwriting is only taught in in the first two years. After that, handwriting takes a back seat and it is more important to learn proficiency on a keyboard.

Yet handwriting is still very important and even psychologists and neurologists say it is too early to declare handwriting a relic of the past. New evidence in a study shows the link between handwriting and broader educational development are linked. In the study, children learn to read more quickly when they first learn handwriting, but also remain better able to generate ideas and retain information. Summarized, it is not what we write that counts, but how. Stanislas Dehaene, a psychologist at the Collège de France in Paris stated the following about handwriting:

“When we write, a unique neural circuit is automatically activated. There is a core recognition of the gesture in the written word, a sort of recognition by mental stimulation of your brain.”

“And it seems that this circuit is contributing in unique ways we didn’t realize. Learning is made easier.”

In another report by The American Conservative, the discovery of handwriting’s importance is still shunned because humanity’s mindset of quantification made us lose that qualitative ground. In an age of numbers, handwriting is simply not taught because it is beautiful and fun. This is sad because handwriting is also a building block for deeper communication and understanding of language. Maybe that is why most of our younger texting generations are terrible at talking with other people.

In conclusion, handwriting is still considered a relic. We, The Inquisitr, even did a report if cursive should even be taught in schools. I can tell you this one fact for sure, no great love story remembered for the ages ever thought mending a heart required a text message.

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